Tom Clements brought to his job as director of Colorado’s department of corrections a passion possibly shaped by childhood experience, likely grounded in strong faith and obviously fueled by a belief — not shaken after 34 years of working with criminals — in the promise of redemption.

The morning after Clements was shot to death at his Monument home, colleagues, friends and even potential adversaries described him as a man committed to his wife, Lisa, and daughters, Sara and Rachel, and to prison reform and prisoner redemption. He also managed to be the rare individual who was both an effective leader and a likable guy.

“He was a dedicated, committed, funny, caring expert at corrections,” Gov. John Hickenlooper said during a public statement Wednesday morning.

Clements was a prison system chief who, his father-in-law Carroll Smith said, opposed the death penalty.

“The whole field is just shocked. It’s devastating. He was well respected especially as a leader and a voice of reason who showed that it’s OK to be a head of corrections and care about people,” said John Wetzel, head of Pennsylvania’s corrections department.

Hickenlooper at times had to pause and collect himself as he spoke of a man who “did his job quietly, intently” and informed that job with the latest data and most up-to-date research on the best ways to make prisons more efficient, more successful and safer — for staffers and inmates.

For a time last fall, Clements did his job from his hospital bed after a bike accident left him with a fractured hip, a fractured shoulder and broken ribs.

But when Ordway Correctional Facility employee Sgt. Mary Ricard was stabbed to death by an inmate in October, he insisted on speaking at her memorial, said Alison Morgan, who worked with Clements at the Department of Corrections.

Clements, who attended Mid- America Nazarene University in Olathe, Kan., and earned a master’s degree from the University of Missouri, started his career as a parole officer in the Missouri corrections system. He worked his way up to become an “icon who brought us into the 21st century,” said George Lombardi, director of Missouri’s Department of Corrections.

Clements took over Colorado’s department in 2011. He had to be persuaded to take the job at first, Hickenlooper said.

Wetzel said Clements told him that “earlier in his career, he wouldn’t have taken the job because he couldn’t have been there enough for his family.”

As it was, the job came when the number of Colorado inmates was rapidly dropping, money was tight, prisons had to be closed and a death-row inmate was running out of appeals. Not an optimum time, some might say, to unpack a bag of reform initiatives, but that’s exactly what Clements did.

Throughout his career, Clements was keenly aware that the overwhelming majority of inmates eventually get out, said Justin Jones, director of Oklahoma’s department of corrections.

That awareness, Jones said, made Clements committed to, even aggressive about, putting rehabilitation of inmates at least on a par with punishment.

Clements, who helped oversee the closure of the Fort Lyon Correctional Facility, had been instituting dramatic change throughout Colorado’s corrections system, said Christie Donner, executive director of the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates for alternatives to incarceration.

“The reverberations from his death are multilayered because it’s so much broader than just his family and the Colorado Department of Corrections family,” she said. “He was really an amazing leader within Colorado.”

Donner said that shortly after Clements arrived in Colorado, he came to her office to talk. She said he told her that while he was growing up, he visited a family member who was in prison. “He shared how that affected him and said that he understood the role of corrections and the impact of corrections on a very deep level.”

One priority, she said, was an overhaul of how the state handles what corrections officials call administrative segregation, which most of the public knows as solitary confinement.

Hickenlooper said the topic came up when Clements was interviewing for the job.

Eventually, Clements laid out a plan to analyze the issue and offer more active rehabilitation to prisoners segregated for “not sufficiently important reasons,” Hickenlooper said.

For a time, solitary confinement became the go-to discipline, almost to corrections officials what timeout is to parents.

Clements was one of the first in the nation to question the wisdom and effectiveness of the practice, Jones said.

“Internally, there are a lot of people who are perfectly happy with doing things the old way,” said Michael Jacobson, director of the reform-focused Vera Institute of Justice. “But (Clements’) line was, the more people start to understand, the more they’ll get on board.”

When Vera was looking for corrections officials to take to Germany and the Netherlands last month to see firsthand how those countries accomplish a high level of rehabilitation, they sought “strong, reform-minded” leaders, Jacobson said. Adding Clements to the travel roster was “a no-brainer,” he said.

Europeans aren’t impressed by much when it comes to this country’s prison system, Jacobson said. “But you couldn’t not be impressed by Tom. He knows his business, … and he just had an incredibly lovely way about him.”

Pennsylvania’s Wetzel was on that trip with Clements, and the two corrections directors found much to commiserate on during the 10 days.

“He and I had both closed facilities and we spent time talking about how difficult that is,” Wetzel said. “Part of our duty is to be good stewards of tax dollars, but at the same time, we both have staff who are impacted when we close facilities.”

As appeals on behalf of killer Nathan Dunlap seem to be nearing an end, Clements had begun looking into the logistics of possibly overseeing Colorado’s first execution since 1997.

Wetzel had come within hours of carrying out an execution in November. So the issue came up, Wetzel said. “We talked about the struggle with doing your job and the seriousness of it,” he said. “It’s the most somber duty any citizen is going to carry out. We’re still humans.”

The issue of their own safety, though, did not.

“When you’re tasked with dealing with folks society says aren’t safe for them to deal with, there are risks. And a lot of your decisions have a big impact on people’s lives,” Wetzel said.

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